6 Meaning
6.1 Religion
You cannot understand my childhood without fully appreciating the role of Christianity, not just in the life of my family and surrounding friends (and non-friends) but in my own personal life. Other than school, no other activity consumed more of our time than our church.
Like everyone who hopes their life can be a long arc of improvement, rather than a static boring maintenance of some status quo, I have learned a lot since childhood, about everything, so of course there are some changes. But in the most important senses, on the most fundamental issues, I haven’t changed. As my perspective broadened in a life full of new experiences, of course I gained a deeper understanding of issues that I once thought were simple.
But first, let me describe my life then and the inseparable relationship I had with my religion.
Please note that I use the past tense in this discussion only to emphasize the fact that these events happened in the past. While in many or most cases, I still believe what I did then, I say “believed” to reflect precisely the times cited. Also, while I think I fairly express what most of us agreed at the time, I don’t want to pretend that I speak for them today.
Sundays of course were almost entirely devoted to the church. As the pastor’s family, we arrived at least half an hour earlier than everyone, and stayed later. This was true for Sunday morning as well as Sunday evening, when we had another service.
Before church, we helped with setting up for the service. Depending on the situation or time of year, this could mean anything from setting up folding chairs for a class or service in the basement, or shoveling snow on the sidewalks outside, vacuuming the carpets, preparing implements for a Communion service, or any number of miscellaneous tasks.
There was also time for socialization before church, first with my brother and sister and then with some of the children of the more enthusiastic churchgoers who arrived early.
In the back of our church was a large map that often provided an interesting focus to our attention. Pins in various countries showed where our missionaries were working, but to me it also showed the wonderful variety of places on earth. We played games where my sister or brother would pick a location at random – a river, a city, a mountain range – and the rest of us would have to guess where it was. Sometimes I would look at the map and imagine myself as an explorer trying to reach some exotic place without passing through some other forbidden territory. In those days, the majority of the world was covered with hostile – and inaccessible – countries like the Soviet Union and China. It was easy to think of our country as the last bastion of freedom in an oppressive world, and that map was for years a focus of how I thought about the larger world.
My closest friends were the children of other regular church-goers, and they would begin to arrive shortly before Sunday School began, offering the first socialization of the day. During the winter months we would cluster inside, or in the basement, chatting or playing games in the indoor warmth. During the Summer, we might be outside, sometimes congregating near the back of the church or on the next door lawn where we could talk or run around.
The hour before the main church service was Sunday School, and although this wasn’t as rigorous as our regular school – no grades, no tests – there was a curriculum to go through, and each Sunday was structured around a lesson covering some aspect of Christianity presented in a way relevant to our age group. Our Sunday school teachers knew us well – many of them had been teaching us for years – so the tone was always informal and interactive.
It would be an exaggeration to say that this was a thorough religious education – a reasonable smart kid would soon learn enough that you could get by without paying much attention to the content of each lesson – but for all of us these lessons became over time something that was just there. Each week, fifty-two weeks per year without fail, year after year, we heard another verse, another story from the Bible, another explanation or detail of our religion. Although I can’t say that we covered every part of the Bible through the years, the key stories and teachings were repeated often enough that even the least attentive kid could soon recite them from memory.
After the hour-long Sunday School lesson, we proceeded upstairs to join the adults in the main “worship” service. Here we had more roles to play: we kids were members of the church orchestra, so we began the service at the front of the church; depending on the time of year and availability of other attendees one of us might also be called upon to be an usher.
The worship service in an Assemblies of God church is far less structured than the Catholic services that my children know, but typically it has three parts: a song service, an offertory, and a homily, which ends in a benediction.
The first part, the song service begins with some introductory remarks followed by a ten or fifteen minute interval of congregational singing. Usually this meant three hymns, sung in a row, and led by a musically-oriented member of the congregation, often my father at times when nobody else was available. My friends and I were at the front of the church during this period. The core group consisted of my brother on saxophone, my sister on trumpet, me on flute, and Jimbo on clarinet, plus a few others: I remember sometimes an extra flute player or another wind instrument. Once the music service was finished, there would be an offertory with additional music, often performed solo by one of us. After this was finished, we returned to our seats near the front.
The homily (we didn’t call it that –we called it the “sermon”) was the longest part of the service, typically twenty to thirty minutes. Usually this was my father speaking, though perhaps once every month or two we might have a guest speaker. It always began with prayer, followed by a Bible reading.
Unlike Catholic or the “mainline” Protestant churches, the specific reading each week was entirely at the discretion of the speaker, so it could range from a short verse, or an oblique reference to one, to a long reading that took up much of the sermon. The congregation was encouraged to bring their own Bibles to the service (I always brought mine) to follow along in the text. It was assumed that the members of the congregation knew how to look up the scriptures themselves. If the preacher referred to “John 3:16”, for example, any Bible-carrying churchgoer could easily find the specific passage without assistance. People unfamiliar with how to look up Bible verses would be welcome to follow along with someone in their surroundings or just listen to the preacher.
The sermon itself was usually based on the scriptural reading, although this would vary considerably depending on the circumstances. During Church religious holidays – Christmas and Easter—the contents were determined by those specific Bible stories and readings. During the rest of the year, the sermon could range from a detailed theological discussion of something or other, to a discussion of current events. Because the sermon was so central to the service, and because so much was at the discretion of the preacher, the speaking talents of the preacher was a major factor in the size and vitality of the church. People were always free to go elsewhere if they didn’t like the sermons.
When the sermon ended, there would be a prayer and perhaps a final song, after which the congregation was dismissed. For my friends and me, this also marked the beginning of the most social part of the day, as we gathered in the back of the church to catch up. We knew everyone – the hundred or so attendees each Sunday – so there was plenty of conversation and I never felt awkward or alone.
For my entire time in Neillsville, this church and this rhythm was as much the backbone of my life as my family – it was my family, literally, since my father was the pastor, and we were there at every service. Conversations before and after church were with people I felt I knew deeply, nearly as well as I knew my brother and sister, and certainly better than I knew even my best friends from school.
Once the rest of the congregants dispersed, my family left for home too. Sometimes Mom would leave a bit early to get started on lunch (which we called “dinner”). When the weather was good, or if Dad looked like he would be staying longer, we might walk home. Occasionally, we might be invited to join some other family for lunch, or on special days like Easter there might be a church-related meal (a “pot luck”), either downstairs in the church basement, or if the weather was nice, at a nearby public park.
Sunday afternoons were always family time, and if it wasn’t just with my immediate family, my family was with me. Sometimes my brother or sister (or I) might spend the afternoon with a friend, but our friends always had parents who were friends of my parents. Our best friends all had brothers and sisters who mapped to my brother and sister, so it rarely made sense to take the trouble to visit somebody’s house without the whole family.
The other, more practical reason our family generally stayed together on Sunday afternoons was that Sunday evenings always included another church service.
The evening services were more informal than Sunday mornings, but the same pattern prevailed. We Spragues arrived earliest, to set up if necessary and to greet everyone else. There was no orchestra, so my siblings and I were a little more free to participate in the rest of the service, but I don’t remember ever using this as a reason to sit near anyone other than the rest of my family.
As you would expect, the evening service was less well-attended, and the congregants were generally more die-hard than the morning attendees. Many of them – the farmers – travelled a reasonable distance, sometimes through inclement Wisconsin weather, to get there, so it was no small sacrifice to come to town twice a day, every week, to attend. We took it all very seriously.
The service could go fairly late, past the bedtime of younger children, and I remember often my mother would (encourage?) let me sleep, laid down flat on the pew. This didn’t seem particularly unusual to me and I probably would have continued it to an older age but for the way that teenagers tend stay up later and need less sleep in the evenings.
Another reason I didn’t sleep was that because the Sunday evening service was attended by only the most enthusiastic parishioners, the sermons were usually more informal, more technical about the nuts-and-bolts of our religion, and often more interesting to somebody like me. I enjoyed the deep theological debates, and the fascinating mysteries I felt were being uncovered for me.
What did I give up? Sunday evenings in those days was also prime television time, and I missed some great TV shows (“The Six Million Dollar Man”, and many great movies on “Walt Disney Presents”). More than the shows themselves, I also missed the cultural references, which were familiar to my non-Sunday night church-going friends.
If Sunday evenings weren’t enough, there was also Wednesday Bible Study, another church night, and we were always there too. Again, since my best friends were also regular church-goers – the causality of friendship goes both ways – it was part of my social life too.
For much of high school, there was a separate youth service on Monday nights. The purpose was mostly social, usually involving an interesting activity, and we didn’t think of it as “church”. For many years, this was my church answer to Boy Scouts – a boys-only group, with our own uniforms, merit badges, campouts, and much more – and again it is hard to separate these activities from the rest of my social life.
In short, my social life and my church were the same thing. Among the more fundamentalist Christian denominations, my experience is not unusual. It seems unusual to many of my friends today – those who I met through college, grad school, and beyond – but that’s more because our lives are so self-contained. With such an emphasis on our religion, and the church-going that accompanies it, there isn’t much time to participate in the rest of the world’s activities.
The same is true, I’m convinced, for anyone or any family caught up in a passion about something, whether it’s sports leagues or Shakespeare Festivals or organic farming. To us, our church was focus of our entire social life. It’s impossible to understand my childhood without understanding this.
Besides these church services, my years were full of other church-related special events. Several times a year, my family attended meetings sponsored by other churches in the area.
Usually the event featured a charismatic speaker, often somebody well-known even outside our church community, such as a successful businessman or a former POW, or occasionally a very famous name like Billy Graham or Oral Roberts. Many of the speakers worked full time at speaking to Christian groups like ours, “Evangelists” who made a living traveling throughout the U.S. (and often, to other countries) preaching about God, always in an engaging and interesting way, full of stories and uplifting examples of how Jesus had helped them, and could help us too.
Many of these were music concerts, sometimes with “famous” musicians like the Lundstroms, an evangelist family who travelled throughout the United States and once even came as close as Marshfield – so of course we were there – giving me my one brush with greatness: after the Lundstrom concert, held at the Marshfield High School auditorium, several of us kids were enlisted to put away the folding chairs. I dutifully complied, taking down chairs and putting them onto rollers for transport into the auditorium storage areas, when suddenly Lowell Lundstrom himself approached me.
“Hey, can you be more quiet? I appreciate your help, but it sounds like shotguns going off out there.”
All of the events had a familiar pattern. There was plenty of music, always well-produced and performed live, with an interesting mixture of familiar hymns and newer, more contemporary songs. There was an inspirational speaker, who talked from the Bible of course, but usually while relating a personal story, always well-told and interesting.
These events were open to the public. In fact, we were encouraged to bring our non-church friends with us, though that was harder to do than it seems given that my social life consisted entirely of church-related activities. More often than not, my friends were already planning to attend.
Unless it was an exceptionally popular event (perhaps featuring a famous musician), there was no admission fee. Instead, sometime in the middle, just after the music and before the speaker began, ushers would come and pass offering plates throughout the audience to ask for donations.
Always, the event ended with a stirring and sometimes unsettling reminder of the shortness of life, the importance of a focus on things of lasting value, and an “altar call”, an opportunity for each individual in the audience to come forward and publicly agree to dedicate themselves to Jesus. For those of us who were already very devoted to Jesus, the altar calls were optional, although occasionally the speaker’s message would be so powerful (or unsettling) that I would be reminded again how perhaps I wasn’t really on the right track after all, and that it wouldn’t hurt to focus just a little more on the main messages of the Gospel.
6.2 The Minister’s Son
My father was pastor of our church for all of my Neillsville memories. It started as a “missions church”, meaning that the statewide district for the Assemblies of God had determined that our area needed a church, and they supplied a small amount of money and a pastor to get things started. Dad was the perfect candidate: sincere, enthusiastic, a college graduate who had grown up as a farmer, like most of the parishioners. The only thing he lacked was a degree from a seminary, but the church could supply that through an extensive correspondence course, which he devoured eagerly. With a certificate of completion in hand, and some assistance from the church statewide leadership, he jumped into the Neillsville pastorship with a passion that I’m sure was rare and appreciated.
His otherwise perfect background had only one flaw: his youth. By the time he celebrated his 30th birthday, we had been living there for several years. Although I was too young to notice at the time, I’m sure he was officiating at weddings and funerals where he was the youngest and least experienced person in the room.
In the late 1960s, though, youth was often an advantage, particularly to the expanding Baby Boom generation. To make ends meet until the church was better established, he worked as a high school teacher, where his youth probably made him easier to relate to the other students. When a “Jesus People Revival” hit the area in the early 1970s, he was a perfect leader, with dozens of young people eager to look to him as a role model and teacher, far more knowledgeable and experienced than they were, but young enough to be “hip” and approachable.
I learned later that “Preachers Kids” are supposed to have problems, especially when they reach their teenage rebellious years, but that was never the case for us. We loved our dad and respected his job and position in the community, although mostly to us it was just a natural and normal part of life. I never felt different – in either a good or a bad way – for being the preacher’s kid. When later people told me that children like us are held to a higher standard, that we would be expected to be perfectly well-behaved compared to other kids, it didn’t make sense to me. I thought we were well-behaved and obedient because the Bible commanded that of everyone. We attended church so much that obviously we knew right from wrong, as would anyone else who took our religion as seriously as we did. This wasn’t about our family, I thought, it was about being a good Christian.
Looking back, and understanding more about the attitudes of mainstream Americans toward minority Christian groups like ours, I assume that many or perhaps most of our schoolmates were taught to look at us with some caution, like an odd cult-like organization full of people a bit too extreme in our beliefs. The Assemblies of God denomination, as well as the evangelical movement of which it was a part, was growing rapidly in those decades, but was far more obscure than it is now. In those days, the idea of a “religious right” was inconceivable either to us or to the political world at large. Mostly we were perceived as a small, perhaps slightly strange, but harmless religious sect which America proudly tolerated.
In fact, we were self-segregating as we were segregated by anyone else. Although we were eager missionaries to others, so much of our time went directly to church-oriented activities that there wasn’t much left over to associate with the rest of our community. We didn’t drink alcohol, for example, so it would have been unthinkable to appear at any of the local Neillsville taverns or nightclubs. We were against going to movie theaters or listening to much popular music. Many of our church members frowned on TV viewing too, so there really was precious little exposure to the wider world, and frankly, that was fine by us.
From time to time, Dad was invited to community-wide gatherings, a city-sponsored Memorial Day event for example, and he might be asked to speak. In a small town like ours, everyone knew the mayor and other city leaders, but they all seemed unapproachable, like people from a far-off world who rarely if ever mattered for our day-to-day lives. I’m sure my parents had more exposure than we kids did, but never to the point where it affected us.
More recently I’ve discovered a generation of ex-Assemblies of God kids who call themselves emergent, who take pride in their openness to alternative theologies. The church of my youth would have dismissed them as simple “backsliders” or heretics, people who had been exposed to the absolute truth and then rejected it. Many of them, in fact, began as rebels from the church, falling into drugs and other behavior, often simply because it had been prohibited. But like me, I think people in the emergent church recognize that within the deeply religious life that we lived as children and teenagers, there was a core, a valuable center that really did make us better people.
There is much to be said for a church-centered evangelical life. The all-consuming aspect of our theology forced us to confront many deep, philosophical issues that are lost on too many adults who never had to confront issues of mortality or morality, topics that we discussed regularly at length. I understand how many of my peers ultimately found the deep, on-going commitment to be too exhausting, or perhaps, too limiting in a world of so much more to discover. But anyone who experienced it and who now reflects honestly will find, like me, that there was much value there, and much to lose for those who leave.
6.3 What We Believed
Christianity to us was not just a part of our lives – it was central to everything we did, the way we acted, the way we thought about other people, the future, the past. It’s hard to overstate this. Our Christianity was not simply a belief system, and certainly not just a set of rituals performed out of respect to family traditions. To believers like us, nothing – absolutely nothing—is more important that your relationship with God: not family, not friends, and definitely not other forms of “earthly” authority like schoolteachers or bosses.
We were warned that, like the original Apostles, many of whom were killed for their beliefs, we too would be persecuted. Our persecution might not be direct and physical – though we heard stories of children taunted on the playground by non-believing bullies – but it would happen all the same.
God is personal and real
We believed in a personal God, all-knowing, all-powerful, involved in every detail of every life, but still ultimately an individual with whom you could have a conversation. God was interactive too; prayer was two-way communication, with we humans speaking to Him, and God speaking back. Not in an audible voice, of course (although we believed that, rarely, this could literally happen) but if you listen carefully, He does speak. He speaks through a subtle, barely conscious voice within, a nagging thought in the back of your mind sometimes, or sometimes something more direct, like a strong feeling that you should act in a certain way.
This personal God is also directly accessible and makes no distinction among people. Anyone can understand God’s message. Through effort, one person might reach a better understanding of the finer details than another, but ultimately the relationship between you and God is direct and individual. There are no “priests”, to intermediate between us and God, and we are all “saints”, equally born in sin but deserving of the same grace granted to everyone who believes.
A sin is a sin no matter how small
We believed that all people are fundamentally sinful. We are born bad, and it is in our nature, our instinct, to do evil. Sin was all around us, a constant temptation. Not just the Big Sins, like murder or bank robbery – no, those were just distractions from the real and in God’s eyes equally serious daily sins we faced like anger or selfishness.
This sense of the ubiquity of sin was very real to me. When I was very young, first or second grade, I heard the Bible passage in the Gospel of Matthew reminded us that we were guilty of adultery simply by thinking lustily after a woman. I became convinced that, since occasionally I showed interest in girls, I was guilty of adultery and was therefore in immediate risk of permanent damnation in Hell. Naturally, this bothered me a great deal until eventually my father intervened to explain that I had nothing to worry about. He filled in more details, and this is how I learned about the birds and the bees.
Sin wasn’t divided into “big” and “small”, mortal and venial. All sins are equally bad in God’s eyes, and all humans are equally guilty. There was no such thing as one person – a saint – who was “better” than another – a criminal. Every single human who ever lived had committed some sin, and was therefore entirely worthy of eternal damnation, and equally in need of humility and submission before God.
Only a few will be saved
But, for whatever reason, God decided to care about our pitiful state of sin, sending his only son Jesus to rescue us. Through Jesus’ death on the cross, and subsequent resurrection, we had a way out of our terrible sinful nature. This was the essential extra step of our belief system: we are bad, but God is a personal being who cares about us, and Jesus is the way out of our sinful nature.
Non-believers, or those who consider themselves “mainstream” Christians yet reject a strict emphasis on Sin often miss this part of the Gospel. I never saw my Christianity as something that was just about sin and all the bad things that happen if you stray from God. Equally, it was about salvation and God’s love, and the wonderful peace and satisfaction that comes from following His will.
Importantly, our Christianity was equal opportunity and open to absolutely anyone who accepted the message. There was literally no distinction among people, rich or poor, educated or not, young or old, male or female, of any race. Every one of us, we believed, is fundamentally a foul, wretched sinner who can only be saved by belief in Christ. Humility, too, was essential, because often it was precisely those who think they are good who are the most deceived of all. True salvation is always a gift of God, and not something we earn by our social status or even our own efforts in the faith. Only God could save you, nobody else.
We are the chosen elect
There is no greater theological gulf than the one separating different denominations among evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity. When the stakes are so high – eternal salvation or damnation – the serious believers will explore every nuance of the faith, uncovering entire revelations of truth in seemingly tiny passages of Scripture. The Assemblies of God was front and center of that tradition, and we believed we had uncovered the greatest truths of all, the source of God’s power delivered in practical terms to humankind: the Gifts of the Spirit.
The most straightforward was the gift of “speaking in tongues”, glossolalia. Under intense and sincere focus on the Holy Spirit, we believed you could spontaneously begin speaking in languages you hadn’t learned. Based on a literal interpretation of the Biblical Book of Acts, where the early Apostles described themselves praising God and preaching to the unconverted in foreign tongues, we believed that normal Christians today could do the same thing, and it was common in our church. My father, of course, and most of the leadership of our church routinely acted on this gift during our church services, especially during the Sunday or Wednesday night services that were attended by the most faithful.
I received the gift of speaking in tongues by around age twelve or so, and during our prayer services nothing felt more natural than to spontaneously begin speaking aloud in what to outsiders sounded like gibberish, but to us was a melodic proof of God’s power, of a direct and real communication with the Creator of the Universe.
There were many Gifts beyond speaking in tongues. The Gift of interpretation enabled a believer to understand and then translate into English the otherwise incomprehensible speech of somebody speaking in tongues. Many of our church members also had the Gift of Prophecy, through which they had a direct channel into some new spiritual insights they could relay to the congregation.
Often these insights were general and broadly applicable admonitions to keep up the faith, but sometimes – when we were really lucky – the prophecies carried a specific prediction about the future. Although it was exciting to hear these predictions, they were usually rather generic, such as a warning to be on the lookout for a stranger who seemed to be of God but actually wasn’t. The most common type of prophecy was conditional: if we did something (e.g. pray more fervently), we would see more of something else (e.g. more converts).
The Gift of Healing was especially relevant to me with my history of surgeries, but for some reason the Gift wasn’t as common, at least among regular church-goers. Most of the Healers I met were visiting preachers – evangelists – who made this a special ministry. People with serious, acute afflictions like diabetes, cancer, or those who were wheelchair-bound might travel long distances to seek help through a well-known healer, and there were many success stories of people who claimed to be healed of incurable diseases.
All of these Gifts made us feel special, like we had a unique and powerful channel to God, a window on a spiritual world that was real and relevant but hidden from our unbelieving neighbors outside the church. It was also a powerful incentive to stay in the church, to study our doctrines more fervently, to learn as much as we could about this fantastic new world.
The altar call: focus on what’s important
With constant reminders of our sinful nature came an undercurrent of belief in the precariousness of life and our situation here on earth, a point that was brought to us forcefully and regularly during the last part of many of our church services, in what we called the “altar call”. It’s easy to be so caught up in the daily cares of our existence that we forget the true meaning of life and that each of us is on earth for a special purpose, and the altar call was a time to humbly acknowledge the ways in which we have veered off the path that we should be taking.
Much later, in the business world when a project came to a point of desperation, we sometimes called a meeting that we called a “come to Jesus”, which somebody with my background could understand intuitively. The altar call is like that: a chance to return to your roots – in religion or in business – and to focus on the fundamentals.
These were the central, core messages which I grew up in, and if I learned nothing else, I knew that this was the way to live: a focus on my fundamentally sinful nature, the existence of a personal God who cares about my wretched condition, the saving grace of His son Jesus, and the overriding priority that we think of life in its eternal context, never losing sight of what is truly important.
Belief in these fundamentals was enough to get me through the rest of my life, the bedrock of my moral system and the lens through which I was taught to see everything else.
Original Sin, Creationism, and more
The world outside my church influenced me more in theory than in reality. I attended a public school, where it was obvious that most of my peers believed differently than me. Although if asked, nearly everyone would have claimed to be Christian, our definition of salvation required a more active and fundamentalist interpretation than most students and teachers thought necessary. In fact, for us the term “Christian” referred exclusively to people with our exact beliefs. Other denominations might call themselves “Christians” but we knew they were abusing the term.
Some people might have interpreted our beliefs as judgmental or even haughty – ha ha, we’re saved, you’re not! – but that concept literally wouldn’t have crossed our minds. After all we are sinners too – and all sins are equal. Instead, we looked at others with a mixture of compassion and fear. We wanted them to convert, but we were wary too that they were likely to persecute us.
I was afraid of the non-Church world, full as it was of people deceived by the Devil and no doubt ready to deceive me too if I gave them a chance. Usually that was not an issue, but occasionally we would have interaction with people who were also enthusiastic Christians, but who disagreed with us on some – to us – major issues.
The Bible Baptist denomination split from the more populous (and mainstream) Southern Baptist denomination over what to outsiders might appear to be picayune and trivial details of faith, but to insiders was a life and death struggle for souls. Satan, after all, fools best when he can tell marginal lies because by getting people to believe a small lie, he grabs a foothold that can lead to who knows what over time.
One serious matter was a question of whether a true Christian – one who has been “saved” – can end up in Hell. It was obvious to us that all sins are equal, and that a single error is all it takes to be eternally damned. But shouldn’t a person’s faith in Jesus have been sufficient to overcome this? Surely a true lifelong believer would be protected somehow in the event of a last-minute sin just before death? At the risk of inviting tomes of criticism for what I write, let me oversimplify by saying that some Christians used this example to argue that true believers would never commit such a sin in the first place. In my church we didn’t believe in this idea of “eternal security”, but as a practical matter it wasn’t relevant. In our day-to-day lives, salvation was something we had to accept by faith – the same faith that we looked to for help in avoiding sin in the first place.
Again, I’m oversimplifying terribly, but this is exactly the type of subject that could provoke hours and days of heated argument between apparently similar believers. It was an impetus for both sides to apply themselves ever dutifully to additional, concentrated study of the Scriptures, many hours or prayer, and always more back-and-forth discussion. To outsiders, or even to insiders who are content to live and let live, this can seem pointless and tedious; but I thrived on this, and learned to this day to enjoy the thrill of understanding that comes from a thorough questioning of seemingly minor challenges to your beliefs.
6.4 Evolution
Nothing in my life posed a greater challenge to my curious and science-oriented mind than the theory of evolution. It would not do, we insisted, to think science is wrong. Almost by definition, we believed science – the objective study of God’s creation – is infallible. What happens when scientists and our religion collide?
To even ask that question shows a naiveté about our religion that annoys me to this day. Science means truth, and truth-seeking. The same is true of Christianity. It would not be possible – indeed, it doesn’t even make sense – for science and Christianity to be at odds with one another. It’s like saying “what would you do if it turned out that people are not human?”
We could point to great scientists throughout history who looked to the Creator – our God – and to Christ and Christianity as the source of their passion and interest in science. After all, to know God requires that we study Him, both through his revealed words in the Bible, and through his Creation. The study of nature is just another aspect of our study of God. We looked with inspiration to many great historical figures from Isaac Newton, who wrote more about theology than he did about physics, to Descartes, who invented much of mathematics as a way to prove more about God’s existence.
Many Christians are content to simply leave it at this: great scientists of the past believed and drew inspiration from their Christianity, so any scientist of today who rejects this is simply wrong. How and why is a subject that requires more deep thinking than many of my Christian friends thought worthwhile.
But not me. I relished the debate, just as I loved the other deep inquiries into the rest of our theological questions. Fortunately, my father, who had been trained as a science and math teacher, was up for the debate and had many books about the subject that I quickly devoured.
The first big challenge in studying why evolution is wrong involves the timeline of creation. If you believe, like we did, that the Bible is literally correct, then the Biblical story of Adam and Eve’s creation seems at odds with everything else we see from the fossil record, for example, which does not seem consistent with the idea that the earth was the product of seven days’ work a few thousand years ago.
Some creationists will argue that there is no conflict: the existence of, say, dinosaur fossils can be easily explained by another Biblical truth, the story of Noah’s flood, which resulted in a mass extinction and burial of ancient creatures under the earth. When confronted with the apparent great age of mountains or other geographical features, we can simply reply that God created them old. When He formed the earth a few thousand years ago, wouldn’t He create fully-formed trees, with tree rings, or mountains with layers of sediment? In other words, there simply is no reason to question the scientific availability of evidence that appears to show age; God made it that way.
In the literal reading of the Bible we practiced in my church, though, we saw many more details. It turns out, we discovered, that the Book of Genesis offers an intriguing additional piece of information when it points out, right after “God created the Heavens and the Earth”, that “the earth was without form and void.” The ancient Hebrew word “was” in this passage, we learned, could be re-translated as “became”. In other words, immediately after God created the Universe, something happened that destroyed everything. That something was an entirely separate creation that included dinosaurs as well as any other evidence of the earth’s age that might seem inconvenient to the stories of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were indeed created a few thousand years ago, but this was eons after the creation of the rest of the earth. And the seven days of creation could have been literal twenty-four hour days, but it all occurred in the distant past, easily within whatever timeline that mainstream science may claim.
Animals and plants were created around the time of Adam and Eve, but we weren’t concerned with the specific dates. The Bible left enough ambiguity between the time of Adam and Noah that it could easily have been many more thousands of years – perhaps hundreds of thousands of years – than a more simplistic reading of the scriptures implied. Although the Bible specifies genealogies in great detail – who begat whom, from Adam all the way to Jesus—we knew that these genealogies often skipped generations. The important thing was that so-and-so was the “ancestor” of so-and-so, and not strictly the immediate parent.
Noah’s flood wreaked far more havoc on the earth than might be apparent from a simple reading of history. The world of Adam and Eve was marked by a mysterious “firmament”, some sort of non-rain atmospheric phenomenon that ended with the Great Flood. Since scientific dating methods like Carbon-14 assume that processes of life and decay are constant through time, the major changes that happened with the Flood are enough to easily explain away any apparently contradictory evidence.
We could go on and on. We knew the arguments for evolution at least as well as my science teachers. If asked, I’m sure I could have written a defense of the science of evolution that would have been prize-winning quality in Neillsville. We had books that explained in detail, then refuted, the scientific evidence of evolution in well-written clarity that all but the most careful reader of science could have understood.
It’s important to point out that although our viewpoint on Evolution was more well-articulated than the others around us in Neillsville, our general beliefs were common enough that this alone would not have ostracized us. Like people everywhere, most of our community simply didn’t prioritize knowledge about biology or science enough to be bothered one way or another.
It wasn’t until later, when I arrived in college, that I finally met my match in an excellent book by the science philosopher Philip Kitcher (who, it turns out, was John Svetlik’s graduate school advisor) that carefully looked over all the evidence that I had been studying in these creationist books. Kitcher’s style appealed to me because he took me and my beliefs seriously and rather than simply laugh my ideas away, he engaged me and then showed the difficulties of my approach, and why ultimately it didn’t really matter to my faith after all.
People who have never been exposed to the die-hard, well-read, and well-meaning creationists (like I was), find it easy to dismiss the entire discussion as “anti-science”, a threat to modernity in general and more specifically a hindrance to the advancement of our technological way of life. I disagree. I think creationists’ interest and passion for science is greatly underestimated, and perhaps even should be embraced. In what other field of intellectual inquiry would such devoted, and vigorous debate of facts be discouraged?
I now believe that serious creationists are anything but close-minded. It is far, far easier scientifically to simply accept whatever is taught in the “mainstream” media and school systems, parroting back whatever answers are considered “appropriate”. I’m fortunate that I was encouraged to spend so much time getting to the bottom of what evolution really means, how “evidence” can be manipulated in any direction to serve a cause, and why really understanding the truth is difficult. There are no shortcuts, and I now think of myself as fortunate to have grown up in a world where I was forced to learn science the hard way, for myself, and that I came to my current beliefs with much more confidence and self-awareness than if I had simply taken what I was learned as an unquestioned fact.
6.5 Philosophy
My religious training made me sensitive to issues of meaning and the wider world generally, but my interest became super-charged when I discovered a set of books in the high school library: the Encyclopedia Britannica Great Works. A shelf full of classics of philosophy, I saw for the first time names like Plato, Descartes, Hume, Marx, with the first volume an introduction that described eloquently the point of it all: how the books here were part of a “conversation” through the ages, from one great mind to another, and how I the dear reader could participate in that conversation. I was hooked.
Around that time, my father was working with other clergy in Neillsville to sponsor a community-based program to show a series of short documentary films by a Swiss-based philosopher named Francis Schaeffer. The well-made films attempted to explain the roots of Western culture from a Christian point of view, discussing key philosophers and their contributions, but then making the claim that the modern world has drifted away from the key insights of these great philosophers, forgetting what has made the West so great.
This documentary was co-produced by Dr. C. Everett Coop, the man who would later become much more well-known as the United States Surgeon General in the Reagan Administration. One of its more vivid scenes – a segment including a large pile of dolls with heads removed, to depict abortions – became a source of controversy for Dr. Coop later and he downplayed his role in the film, but at the time it struck all of us as an unusually sharp and vivid portrayal of our core, small town, Christian values. To me it was also a fascinating introduction to ideas, to ways of thinking about history, ethics, metaphysics, in much more depth than I had seen before. I also realized that these subjects had been much-studied by the larger world around me, not just the Christians I had been exposed to so far, and I learned that such subjects could be learned in a way that was entirely consistent with my Christian education. Indeed, the film and accompanying study guides suggested that our approach to philosophy was the real one, the one most consistent with the original intent of these great heroes throughout history.
My brother attended the same events, of course, but showed little interest. It just wasn’t practical, he thought. But I drank it all up.
Soon I was looking for the original sources of the works mentioned by Schaeffer, which led me back to the Britannica Great Works. I started with John Locke and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which I read after hearing that this was one of the key Enlightenment books that influenced the American Revolution. Although I won’t claim that my teenage, Neillsville-trained mind was up to the powerful ideas contained in that book, I certainly wanted to understand. On a nearby library shelf, I also found Bertrand Russell’s History of Philosophy, which I devoured even more intensely, including the chapters on modern philosophy, which had been referenced negatively by Schaeffer, but which I felt inspired to tackle head-on. My faith was strong enough, I felt, to withstand some of the deceptive ideas that Satan had put into these philosophers, and I saw my reading as a way to improve my faith.
Similarly, my father had come into possession of a book about the history of America, The Light and the Glory, by a Christian minister/historian named Peter Marshall. Published in 1977, its ideas had become popular after the American Bicentennial celebrations because, to us Christians, Marshall presented a view of history that placed American religious tradition at the center of what made our country great. Although I’ve since studied far more history, and would today probably find that book not very satisfying, at the time it was illuminating to me because, first, with all its footnotes and careful reading of history became an example to me of the importance of first-rate research, and second, the contrast it struck with what I learned in my high school history texts helped me see – and seek out – variants of history that are not today considered “mainstream”. Like the philosophy books I was reading, I felt like this was opening to me a new world, a secret and hidden set of truths that were unknown and special.
6.6 Politics
During the Nixon presidential campaign of 1972, my fourth grade friends and I worried anxiously about who would win. After all, so much – our future, and the fate of the world – was at stake! One friend concluded, based on what her dad’s comments, that the outcome was obvious. “Everyone we know is voting for McGovern”.
Although at the time her conclusion left me disappointed, I took this as another sign that my family and I were different, a tiny minority of Christians in a hostile world. My father talked about politics regularly within our family, and though I was too young to understand the details, I knew that we were mostly cheering for the Republicans. Our reasons were not economic, or even social, as the “religious right” would later contend. Dad was, simply, anti-communist, because communism was atheist. Our world was painted in stark black and white terms, as Jesus said “whoever is not for me is against me.” I think Dad could have supported any political movement, as long as it was anti-communist. When the George Wallace ran for president in 1968 and 1972, the segregationist part of his platform was beside the point as far as we were concerned. At least he understand the clear threat of communism.
In rural America, though, to be a Republican was hardly a minority position. My McGovern-loving friend was wrong, as we soon learned in a classroom “election”, where Nixon won by even more of a landslide than he did in real life. Among my relatives, everyone was Republican, including my Catholic grandparents.
The one exception was my outspoken grandmother, but we thought of her generally as a crank about such things. And anyway it wasn’t clear she thought much about it, because her main reason seemed to be her gratitude to FDR for getting us out of the depression. Democrats, she believed, fought for the poor; communism, to her, was a sideshow.
To us, it was not a sideshow. To be anti-Communist was to be pro-America, pro-Christian. You couldn’t possibly think anything else. Protesting the Vietnam War, a clear case of good versus evil, was from this perspective an act of treachery. Evil communism was on the rise everywhere, and we Christians were the only significant force that would hold it back. We had to remain firm about this; America’s future was on the line.
We were encouraged, but not deceived, when Jimmy Carter’s election brought the idea of being a “Born Again” Christian as a topic of conversation in American politics. Despite his regular references to the Bible and fundamentalist Christianity, our support for him was out of the question given his – to us – obvious tolerance of communism. If anything, Carter’s religious positions became to us a warning of how deceptive the Devil could be, using the same language we used in order to trick us into supporting evil.
During the Bicentennial period, interest in American history was natural, and my father introduced me to a popular book among Christians at the time, a history of America called The Light and the Glory, by Presbyterian minister and one-time Senate chaplain Peter Marshall. It presented the history of America since Columbus as one of direct intervention by God, to create a special nation and culture built on Christian principles. Marshall’s book was full of wonderful details about American history that I saw for the first time, and it impressed me not just for its message but for the excitement of seeing how a whole new way of viewing history could be exposed by a careful researcher.
The Seventies were years of significant economic and political turmoil, with rising inflation, the shock of Watergate, American defeat in Vietnam, and a seemingly non-stop rise of Communism. As I became more aware and interested in the politics of the wider world, I also saw the Democratic Party as the clear overseer of all of this mayhem. After all, they controlled both houses of Congress (and the Presidency, after 1976). This was no coincidence, I concluded, and began to think of Republicans as the last defense American had against, not just godless communism, but also everything that went against American values.
What did I know about the world? I watched the nightly news, usually NBC, whenever we had a TV set. At various times throughout the 70’s, my father subscribed to US News & World Report, which I read too, though I don’t remember spending too much time on it. The biggest source of news was probably the Milwaukee Journal, which as the paper boy I had the opportunity to read regularly.
Our high school forensics club, a group focused on learning to speak in public, was a natural fit for me. Forensics was divided into different sections, some of them based on length, some based on style of speaking. I chose extemporaneous speaking, appealing to me because it required the least amount of actual preparation. While others (like Jimbo) had to spend weeks preparing a specific speech, working carefully on the content and delivery, I would be given a topic an hour before the speech, and was expected to speak for about five minutes, intelligently and with good delivery.
I enjoyed the chance to speak off the cuff, but doing well meant a different sort of preparation: I had to read the news generally, and absorb facts and ideas in a way that could be useful later. You never knew what the topic of your speech would be, only that it would have something to do with current events. So I read as much as I could about the headlines, and tried to develop opinions – and if possible, a framework for making opinions – to keep all of my speeches interesting and on-topic.
My brother, on the other hand, never showed interest one way or another. If you had asked him at the time, I’m sure he would nodded in general agreement if a conversation concluded the Democratic Party was godless and evil. But he wouldn’t have been interested in the details and certainly not in any debate about it.
He read the comic section in the newspapers he delivered, but the rest of the paper he found tedious and irrelevant. He had a practical bent. If you showed him how a policy proposal had a direct impact on his life, he might have had an interest. Otherwise, what was the point?
He was fiercely independent by nature, instinctively opposed to anyone who might try to limit his ability to do something. At the same time, he abhorred the idea of being dependent on others. He was viscerally opposed to the idea of ever receiving a government “handout”, for example, or somehow being given something without working for it. When my grandmother expressed support for government proposals like those of FDR or LBJ, Gary was skeptical. “If they’re that poor, they should just get a job”, he’d respond. After all, that’s what he did.
6.7 Race and Sex
Neillsville’s racial makeup might be worth noting to demographers of the early 21st century, who seem obsessed about such things. But it literally never occurred to us to think of ourselves as “white” or any other race. We were just normal Americans.
We knew, theoretically, about the existence of black people – we studied the horrors of slavery in school, like everybody else in America. We felt some pride at learning how Northerners had fought against slavery in the Civil War, and about the bravery of those Northerners who helped with the Underground Railroad.
The only exposure we had to black people was via the media, which always portrayed them as heroes and celebrities. Black athletes and movie stars didn’t dominate the way they do now, but we certainly knew of them and cheered for them, like everyone else.
Still, underneath our experience with the positive examples we saw in popular culture, we knew that some black people were stigmatized, for crime especially but also for other vices. We couldn’t point to any personal examples, but when traveling to other places it was natural to see them as “other”. We treated them like we treated all outsiders: be polite and helpful, give them the benefit of the doubt, but be a little careful.
We were aware that others, particularly those in the South, had different experiences with black people. My family was sympathetic with George Wallace despite his racial views, because he was so articulate in expressing his anti-communism. I was too young to have an opinion about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but none of its consequences mattered much to us at the time. Nobody in Neillsville would have imagined separate drinking fountains, or any rules that treated races differently.
Not everyone in our small community was white. We knew many Chippewa Indians, of course, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to boast of partial Indian ancestry. One of our church friends had a Filipina mother. My doctor was Japanese-American. The Gungors mother was Puerto Rican – which some people today would classify as non-white – but nobody would have thought that back then.
These many examples of interracial marriage prove that we were generally accepting of such things. That said, a black-white marriage would have strained our tolerance, though not because we would have objected per se. We had no animosity toward any race, but we recognized that not everyone felt the same way, and that marriage – being permanent – included children and grandchildren, whose own lives would naturally be affected by such a union. We knew that “half breed” could be a pejorative, and that parents bore some responsibility for bringing such a child into the world. Most of our community would have opposed laws that forbid interracial marriage, but we would have wanted the parents to think long and hard before bringing a child into it.
Homosexuality, on the other hand, was completely worthy of ridicule. We knew of no openly gay people, and to the extent we heard of them, they were targets of scorn deserving of our ridicule. It’s important to remember, of course, that we didn’t think of homosexuality as a trait, like skin color, that some people are born with and can do nothing about. Rather, it was an activity, like pedophilia, adultery, or prostitution. Sure, there may be people who do it, but it’s always bad.
I remember being told of the existence of a tall building in Minneapolis that was a popular gathering place for gay men. And of course we knew of San Francisco’s reputation as a haven for such people. But this was presented as a joke. It was completely acceptable to make fun of such people, in the same way you could make fun of somebody who chose to wear different clothing. We wouldn’t tolerate physical violence against such people, of course; peer pressure was enough disincentive to keep away any thoughts of something we considered so unnatural.
Once, during my summer job at the foundry, I remember one of my friends asking the serious question about how such a thing as homosexuality could even exist. “Where do they put it?”, he asked in all innocent sincerity.
Years later, as homosexuality became acceptable – and even praiseworthy – in mainstream American society, we learned of several Neillsville classmates who “came out”. After same-sex marriages were legally recognized, at least one of our classmates married. It’s difficult to describe how hard it would have been back in high school to understand – let alone condone or even celebrate – such an idea.
Along with the mainstream acceptance and then celebration of race and sexuality as a “core parts of who we are”, there is the opposite strain where it has become popular to criticize our “small town values” as bigotry, “hatred”, and even “un-American”. I think such a characterization overshoots, and misunderstands our real thoughts.
Our fundamental, core value, was the acceptance that “all men are created equal”, that we are all God’s children. We also believed that none of us is without sin and that any criticism of our fellow humans must be accompanied by a health dose of humility.
That said, we also believed that Satan is real, and that there are evil forces hoping to undermine the basis on which we built our society. If we called out people who did something immoral or dangerous, we weren’t attacking the people, but rather their actions. Once they repented, they would be fully accepted.